Conventionally, jobs that are sent to a printing facility to be printed have print quality requirements attached thereto. Moreover, conventionally, a printing establishment produces a proof print for approval by the customer prior to printing. The proof print ensures that the print quality of the prints meet the requirements imposed by the originators of the documents.
As an alternative to an actual proof print, a soft proof, that is an electronic image, may be substituted for the hard copy print. A system that is used to generate soft proofs should produce an image that is a faithful representation of the equivalent hard copy print. The soft proof should be faithful enough so that a designer of an image to be printed can be sure that the resulting prints will meet some set of print quality requirements.
Many conventional color printers utilize more than the standard four colorants (CMYK). The extra colorants utilized by these machines enable the extending of the gamut of the printer or to provide the ability to print a specific color directly instead of reproducing the specific color by a CMYK combination.
Furthermore, conventional printers have utilized additional colorants, not as part of the fixed set, but rather as an expanded set of colorants which may be attached to the printer at any time.
Having replaceable colorants allows printing of specialized colors to an exacting specification. An example of such a specialized color is printing of a corporate logo in a very specific color; e.g. Pantone 32.
When a print establishment has one or more configurable color printers, each job would require installing the set of configurable colorants needed for the job. However, a significant amount of time can be lost due to the overhead associated with changing the colorants. This overhead may be reduced by scheduling the jobs so that jobs with similar colorant requirements are processed together, thereby reducing the overhead associated with changing colorants.
When a printing establishment has multiple printers with various configurations, there are options for how to produce a print from a submitted job. For example, a job may specify a specific spot color.
Conventionally, this job would be printed by mounting a configurable color housing containing the required spot colorant. However, the required spot color may not be available, or there are time constraints that make alternatives to the specific spot color desirable.
For example, a customer may be willing to reproduce the spot color by a combination of CMYK colorants as opposed to the single spot color. Other alternatives may also be available using various combinations of colorants.
However, if the customer approval is done using a soft proof, the soft proof should take into account the differences in print appearance due to the different combinations of colorants. Furthermore, the different combinations of colorants can also produce other differences in the final print other than those due to the different colorant combinations.
As an example, producing a color using a combination of CMYK colorants may match the equivalent spot color closely, but the CMYK combination may have different noise characteristics.
Therefore, it would be desirable to have a soft proof system that produces an image that takes into account the different colorant options that may be used to produce the print.